Organizer

​In response to
pressure from various stakeholders, many transnational businesses have
developed codes of conduct and monitoring systems to ensure that working
conditions in their supply chain factories meet global labor standards.
Many observers have questioned whether these codes of conduct have any impact
on working conditions or are merely a marketing tool to deflect criticism of
valuable global brands. Using a proprietary dataset from one of the
world’s largest social auditors, containing audit data for over 30,000 audits
of nearly 15,000 establishments in 43 countries, we conduct one of the first
large-scale comparative studies of adherence to labor codes of conduct to
determine what combination of institutional conditions promotes compliance with
the global labor standards embodied in codes. We find that these private
transnational governance tools are most effective when they are embedded in
states that have made binding domestic and international legal commitments to
protect workers’ rights and that have high levels of press freedom and
nongovernmental organization activity. Taken together, these findings
suggest the importance of multiple, robust, overlapping, and reinforcing
governance regimes to meaningful transnational regulation.​